Z badań nad białostockim epizodem w biografii Rafała Lemkina

Rafał Lemkin became famous in historiography as the creator of the concept of genocide (genocide). This Polish lawyer of Jewish origin, graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Jan Kazimierz in Lviv and was a pupil of the outstanding Polish criminal lawyer Juliusz Makarewicz. From his student days, he became interested in the lack of legal regulations in the field of criminal liability for committing mass murders on a specific national or ethnic group. An important impulse for the development of this thought for the young Lemkin were the famous trials of the assassins Talaat Pasha, responsible for the slaughter of Armenians during the Great War, and Symon Petlura, charged with the responsibility for pogroms against Jews in Ukraine. Before the outbreak of World War II, Rafał Lemkin, as part of his activity in the Polish section of the International Criminal Law Association, presented at a conference in Madrid in 1933 the first visions of the concept of international criminal jurisdiction of genocide offenses. After the outbreak of World War II and his escape to the United States, he started working in the War Department and as a university lecturer. In 1944, he published his opus magnum – “The Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”, where he formulated and accurately described the concept of genocide as a crime of international law. Lemkin’s idea was quickly appreciated. As early as December 1946, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing genocide as a crime of international law, and two years later it adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He described his extremely interesting life in the autobiography entitled “Totally Unofficial”, which was translated and published in Poland in 2018. Rafał Lemkin describes many details of his life, but omits the period of his residence in Białystok, where he allegedly passed his matriculation exams in 1919, and his student days at the Jagiellonian University, when he gained the necessary experience and knowledge in legal fields to help him develop the concept of criminalisation of genocide.

Understanding the Role of Linguistic Complexity in Famous Trial Outcomes

Famous trials not only generate immense popularity and intrigue, they also have the power to change history. Surprisingly, little research examines the use of complex language during these culturally-significant trial outcomes. In the present study, we helped fill in this gap by evaluating the relationship between attorneys’ use of integratively complex language and trial outcomes. Using the well-validated Automated Integrative Complexity scoring system, we analyzed the complexity of language in the opening and closing statements of famous trials. We found that higher levels of integrative complexity led to a significant increase in winning outcomes, but only for the prosecution. Further, this effect was driven by elaborative forms of complexity and not dialectical forms of complexity. Taken together, these results fill a large gap in our understanding of how language might influence the outcomes of culturally-significant legal proceedings.

Per una metodologia del protogiallo italiano: Problemi e proposte

In the first systematic study about the Italian detective novel (1979), Loris Rambelli dates the beginnings of the genre to 1929, the publication year of the first of publisher Mondadori's ‘Yellow Books’ (Libri Gialli), the series of yellow-covered books which made the ‘giallo’ synonymous with a crime novel. Nonetheless, texts dealing with mysteries, criminals, police, trials and detection enthralled Italian readers from the 1850s on, complying with the modern dynamics of mass phenomena, contributing to the modern conception of the genre, and playing a crucial role in the culture and society of a recently unified Italy. Not conforming to a recognizable genre-structure, the pre-1929 period has been defined the “prehistory of Italian crime fiction” or protogiallo and has become a topic of academic interest only in recent years. The newness of the scholarship explains the methodological difficulties researchers have to face, such as the classification problem – it is very complex to establish common critical criteria for analyzing diverse materials such as feuilletons, novels, short stories and famous trials journals – and the objective delay in the development of the genre in Italy, especially compared to the British, American and French cases. Building on the recent line of investigation, this paper examines such critical issues in order to identify a methodological approach and a theoretical framework useful to study the prehistory of Italian crime fiction.

A Contrastive Study of Conceptual Metaphor in Chinese and American Courtroom Discourse

Based on the corpora of 20 Chinese cases from Court Insession and 20 American cases from Famous Trials, the current study aimed to to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to carry out a contrastive analysis of the main conceptual metaphors between the two countries’ corpora and further explore the reasons for selecting the same and different conceptual metaphors in the two courtroom discourses. By analyzing the two countries’ corpora, the result showed that life experience and the way of thinking are the main reasons for similarities of the conceptual metaphors between Chinese and American courtroom discourses, while cultural connotation and social environment account for the dissimilarities of the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American courtroom discourses.

Poisons, trials and experts:

Pere Mata i Fontanet (1811–1877) was the most important Spanish toxicologist in the nineteenth-century. However, he remained an invisible character outside Spanish borders. He was the author of the most influential Spanish treatise on legal medicine and toxicology, which had six editions but was never translated. His treatises did not include experimental results but rather a rhetorical discussion and a place where he discussed and claimed for changes to be made in those new sciences. His participation in famous trials such as poisoning cases contributed to increase his claimed authority as an expert. This paper will show that it was precisely during those trials, when experts had to face the puzzling questions of lawyers and jurors, that toxicology was built.

Inheritance

This chapter surveys some of the most important aspects of the law of both testate and intestate inheritance in the period under discussion. It argues that the Roman law of succession can only really be understood within the context of Roman society, the networks of association and kinship and the complex social bonds that operated within the more privileged classes for whom inheritance was an important aspect of their social legacy and the legal standing of their family in generations to come. Ancient literary sources, reports of famous trials, sophisticated argumentations in the works of the jurists and epigraphic evidence enable different approaches to a better understanding of legal thinking and legal interpretation. Since succession was forbidden between Romans and peregrines, the law of inheritance was a special Roman matter, an important part of identity and a tool of integration.

LA PROVA STATISTICA NEL PROCESSO PENALE

A general topic is faced in the first three sections, i.e. the role of objective and subjective probabilities in trials, the determination of conditional probabilities, and Bayes’ formula (or theorem); the last topic is a fundamental device which allows the computation of probabilities of possible causes, given related information about certain effects. Strictly connected to this argument is the «fallacy of the transposed conditional», which usually implies an unwarranted assumption of guilt. The fifth section is devoted to a discussion of some main features of two famous trials, those of Alfred Dreyfus in France and of Sally Clark in U.K., in which the above fallacy is clearly recognized. The final section presents kinds of trials which require a judgment about groups of people; the statistical methods applied in these cases pertain to the so-called tests of significance.

Il vaso e i cocci Note in margine a La llegenda del llibreter assassí de Barcelona

Riassunto: Il contributo discute alcune questioni legate, in modo più o meno tangenziale, a La llegenda del llibreter assassí de Barcelona: dopo aver sottoposto il libro di Ramon Miquel i Planas alle domande, di metodo e di merito, presenti in un affine e più recente “giallo filologico” (il saggio di Alberto Varvaro sulla vicenda della baronessa di Carini), e dopo essersi interrogato circa il filone paraletterario delle cosiddette “Cause celebri” e circa una declinazione naturalista e straniante della letteratura processuale (il dittico di Galdós Realidad-Incógnita), il discorso si sposta su di un aspetto più prettamente storico-culturale e tematico quale l’intreccio fra bibliomania e cleptomania (soprattutto in Flaubert). L’articolo si conclude con una rapida ricognizione dei plagi letterari realizzati da Nodier, il presunto colpevole del falso da cui si diparte tutta la genealogia indagata da Miquel i Planas: un colpevole che, proprio mentre si macchia di molteplici crimini letterari, dedica loro un sofisticato trattato giurisprudenziale, in cui sistematizza e stigmatizza quegli stessi crimini. Parole chiave: filologia; paraletteratura; processo; bibliomania; plagio Abstract: This essay seeks to investigate tangentially some questions regarding La llegenda del llibreter assassí de Barcelona: after having analyzed the approaches, methods and strategies –that Alberto Varvaro has thoroughly examined in the essay on Baroness di Carini’s story–, and the literary quality achieved by Ramon Miquel i Planas in his work; and after having probed the paraliterary line of the so-called “famous trials” –mostly focusing on the naturalistic estrangement effect produced by literature works related to legal cases (e.g. the conventional diptych in Galdós’s Realidad-Incógnita)–, the centre of attention shifts on the cultural, historical aspects of the bizarre relationship between kleptomania and bibliomania (especially in Flaubert). The article concludes with a swift overview of literary plagiarisms committed by Nodier, the presumed culprit of the forgery, from which the genealogy investigated by Miquel i Planas builds up: a culprit that, while committing several literary crimes, decides to write a jurisprudential treaty in order to systematize and sentence them. Keywords: philology; paraliterature; process; bibliomania; plagiarism